Streaming Pick (5/14/14)

Frontline: United States of Secrets, Part 1: The Program

If PBS' Frontline documentary series isn't the best show on television, it has to be pretty close. And given that 60 Minutes has become quite a joke and Dateline long ago became a basic-cable level tabloid, Frontline's long-form news format might also be the most important show on TV.

Frontline doesn't really break much news or provide the most in-depth detail on an issue possible. It instead finds important stories that tend to have already featured a good deal of reporting and then they compile it, expand on the reporting, land interviews or access few other programs or reporters could get, and then put it together into a well-edited presentation of the news story without soft-pedaling or creating false equivalencies.

Frontline did this well a few weeks ago with their story on solitary confinement. The problems with over-use of solitary confinement by prisons are well-documented. But Frontline added to the story by gaining access to a solitary confinement unit at a Maine prison and showing what is happening first hand. That is something few scholars, documentarians, or reporters might be able to do without Frontline's and PBS' sterling reputation, or their commitment to long-form journalism rather than soundbites. Frontline has done the same in the past on numerous issues.

Last night Frontline aired the first part of a two-part series on the Surveillance State in the USA, called The United States of Secrets. Numerous books and articles have been written on this issue and will continue to be written. But no one of which I am aware has really done a great job of distilling it down to a non-polemical, summary news program - and there's so much to it that the summary will end up taking nearly four hours in two parts.

Part 1 of the United States of Secrets is subtitled "The Program." The Program starts in the recent present with the Edward Snowden whistleblower revelations that started coming out in 2013 and have been trickling out ever since. After introducing this issue, it then backtracks to the days after the 9/11 attacks. Dick Cheney and his lawyer David Addington began plotting on how to go nuts on surveillance and to do so while covering their own asses. Much of this story is told well in Barton Gellman's excellent book Angler.

As people in the government began to get wind of what the NSA was doing under the direction of Dick Cheney and then NSA head Michael Hayden, they began to be appalled at what they saw as clear violations of the law. Frontline pivots well into this and explores the whistleblowers that began to emerge nearly immediately and that continued to signal alarms for years. The show also does a great job of showing how government officials attempted to cajole opponents into remaining silent. If that didn't work, they resorted to threats and intimidation.

As Frontline depicts, a favorite and oft-used tactic of supporters of the surveillance was to try and guilt people into staying silent by insisting that those people would be to blame when thousands died "in the next attack" (the number varies from mere thousands to, in Addington's bombastic hands, "hundreds of thousands"). There's also a great story of Michael Hayden trying to convince someone that the program was worthwhile by claiming it stopped someone from destroying the Brooklyn Bridge - with, ahem, a blowtorch. If all of that didn't work, the government sent over FBI agents to people's houses with guns drawn, hoping to gin up fodder to make more threats (the people that suffered this treatment provide harrowing testimony on how their lives were affected).

Without doing a blow-by-blow account of the plot of this documentary, I will note that the entity that may come out looking worst of all (well, assuming you already know what Dick Cheney and David Addington were like) is the New York Times. They had the story of the government's warrantless wiretapping - which was a clear violation of the law (when the government got caught, they convinced a compliant Congress to pass new laws to make it retroactively OK statutorily, if not Constitutionally). Only the Times had the story in an election year.

The Bush White House, knowing that re-election hung in the balance, put on a full court press. Eventually, it worked and the New York Times spiked the story. The best former Executive Editor Bill Keller could muster as an excuse is that the story "wasn't ready," even though it is obvious the Times had been intimidated and was afraid of looking bad. The next year, one of the reporters on the story decided to pull an end-run on the Times by threatening to include the story as a chapter in his book. Now afraid of looking embarrassed by the public revelation that they had spiked the story of illegal conduct by the President and his administration, Bill Keller and the Times suddenly decided the story was ready. Keller and the Times come off as craven entities more worried about public relations than journalism.

Even though the story eventually ran, and the conduct was exposed, Frontline details how the Bush Administration responded with a media counter-attack in which they simply lied about what was being done (as we now know from the Snowden disclosures). The counter-attack was a success.

There are numerous other stories and a great through-line of how the NSA built up its massive program of warrantless surveillance, ignored the law, and then fought like hell to keep it going whenever challenged. It's a great documentary.

For a person heavily invested in this story, it's a great summary of what you might already know supplemented by a series of interviews with characters in the drama that few have been able to muster. For people that might not know a lot about the story, it serves as a terrific primer on the issue. For anyone, it is great drama and a riveting documentary. It incidentally raises difficult, if not downright horrifying, questions about the state of our constitutional republic.

I highly recommend this Frontline episode to any and all. As added bonuses, Frontline has compiled a ton of great additional material (and is conducting chats) on its website. Plus, at present you can watch it for free on that website or via PBS' Roku channel. You can also pay to stream or download it via Youtube or iTunes.

Streamed via PBS Roku Channel.